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Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However,
by DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it.
However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something that only little children use (as an aid to learn the characters). Once you've put in the effort to learn the characters (as about a billion people have), it's very difficult to accept their replacement by what is viewed as a script for children.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoAlmost all digital communication is written using pinyin, which today is almost all written communication
- alexlur 2y agoThis is an extremely mainland-centric view. Cangjie is the dominant IME in Hong Kong.
- asdasdsddd 2y agoThat's why I said almost all
- alexlur 2y agoIt’s only almost all if you only interact with the millennials or younger. Pinyin is an IME for Mandarin. If you aren’t fluent in Mandarin, chances are you use voice input or stroke typing.
- causality0 2y agoWhy shouldn't it be mainland-centric? Mainland China is 99.5 percent of the population of China. That's like refuting a claim about Americans by calling it "a very non-Pennsylvanian view".
- alexlur 2y agoBecause China is not the only place where Chinese languages are spoken. There’s more than 10 million ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia alone. And it’s not only a mainland-centric view: it’s a mainland–Mandarin speaking centric view.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoPinyin is used as input to select characters, but the final text that's used to communicate is composed of characters.
- mchaver 2y agoThe nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
- Terr_ 2y ago> information density of writing I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
- user982 2y agoI was reading a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.: 收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字. was translated into He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed them in the palace. He unified the law, weights and measurements, standardized the axle width of carriages, and standardized the writing system.
- cwilby 2y agoI just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters. For example, "去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket". 3 syllables vs 7 syllables. To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are mini-words unto themselves.
- mook 2y ago
- sho_hn 2y agoHere is wonderful article by John DeFrancis on the topic: The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform (2006) https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re... It is cited frequently.
- kalleboo 2y ago> However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?
- alexlur 2y agoThey are not comparable. The Chinese script was tailor-made for Chinese languages, while it was simply adopted by the Koreans, which arguably was a bad fit because it’s 1) agglutinative and 2) not even a Sino-Tibetan language. Even then hanja is still part of the national education curriculum today (look up 한문 교육용 기초 한자).
- numpad0 2y agoPrewar Korean written script used Japanese style Kanji for nouns intermeshed between Hangul phonetics. Postwar, under US influence they transitioned into all-Hangul phonetic language, but IMO it looks a big regression in their communication ability due to resulting arrays of pure homonyms. They rely purely on context to distinguish {"apples", "apologies"}, {"mayor", "market"}, {"stomach", "ship", "pear", "double"}, {"acting", "delays", "smoke"} so on and so forth if what I'm scrolling is right. There's no tonal or character distinction. That surely isn't great.
- yongjik 2y agoI don't know where you got the idea of "under US influence", but mixed Korean/Chinese character writing was common in South Korea well into 1980s, long after Korea became its own country. For example, in 1987, the newly founded Hankyoreh newspaper made a splash by deliberately writing all articles in pure Korean script, which was not the norm until then. Gradually more books and newspapers followed suit, because pretty much everybody found that writing everything in Korean letters actually make communication less ambiguous and easier to understand. If your phrase is ambiguous between whether someone's offering apples or apologies, then you just change the word or add additional context to make it clear which one is being offered. It's no different from how English speakers deal with bear/bear, tear/tear, arm/arm, ground/ground, and so on.